Skill Confusion

There is a conversation happening over in the 5E and Critical Role communities about, "When you should roll a skill roll?" A Critical Role GM said a bit of roleplaying was so good, he said, "No skill roll needed!" Some OSR types got angry. How could he "not roll?" That is an OSR rule, not 5E!

I sit over here in GURPS-land and wonder, "Really?"

How is this hard?

What are they even talking about?

I will shorten all of this and point out the obvious: anger engagement is engagement, and this is probably something about nothing. People are riding coattails again and finding silly things to be angry about. Also, mind you, if any of them played a true skill-based system, which some of us have been doing since 1980, they would have figured this out decades ago.

GURPS has had this figured out for the last 40 years.

This all stems from the bad habit of 5E players, and the game encourages it with passive skills: when characters enter a room, every player says, "I roll perception!" Instead of convincing an NPC through roleplaying, the player shouts, "I roll persuasion!" 

We have it nice and clear. From GURPS, Campaigns, B343, the first page of that book:

To avoid bogging down the game in endless die rolls, the GM should only require a success roll if there is a chance of meaningful failure or gainful success.

It is simple. From the D&D 5.1 SRD, page 77:

The GM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results.

Oh, that is simple too. So, if I search the statue and tell the referee I am pressing the third button on the statue's jacket, just like the clue we found earlier said to open the secret passage, no roll is required?

Yes, if you hit a bullseye with your roleplaying, searching, interaction with the environment, or the referee says "don't roll" because "the outcome is certain," you do not need to roll. Both D&D 5E and GURPS are crystal-clear on this.

In fact, if, in GURPS, a player says their character "searches the room" but doesn't say any of the W's (who, what, where, when, why, and how) - or gives me any clue where they are looking or what they are looking for is probably staring at a -4 to -8 modifier in GURPS as my ruling. I'd say "looking for anything" in that large an area is a very hard skill roll.

Yes, searching a large area is more difficult than searching a small area, especially when time is a factor. But, again, only roll if there is a chance of meaningful failure or gainful success. You may just say they find it after an hour of searching, mark a torch off, roll for some wandering monsters, and move on. On the flip side, searching a very small area will be easier. GURPS covers this with the universal difficulty modifiers. The referee makes the call.

Tell me, are you searching the desk or the bookshelf? For that, I may give you a 0 to -2 modifier, depending on how well it is hidden. Well, you are searching for the key that was taped under the top desk drawer? No roll needed. Bingo. You hit the jackpot.

What am I making anyone roll for that?

Even in GURPS, that is silly.

Same thing with roleplaying. "I roll intimidation" is going to get you a pretty hefty negative modifier since you aren't telling me anything. What, are you leering at them? Come up with a great one-liner? Make my day, +4, easy task. Or maybe even automatic success. Give me something specific to work with here, and I will take that into consideration.

This is GURPS; there are ways to make a skill check easier by narrowing your focus and telling the referee exactly what you are attempting. The risk is that if you focus on the desk, and the passage is behind the bookshelf across the room, no roll is going to help you find it. Maybe someone "searches the room in general" while a few of you each take an area of the room?

Then again, give me a reason to roll. You come up with a search plan like that, and I may rule after 5 minutes of looking; the person searching the bookshelf finds the passage. Mark off some time and move on. Why are we rolling?

Also, whether a player has a skill or not may be a factor in GURPS, "if you roll," and "can you even attempt this?" If a character is a pilot, they will generally know the procedures for landing a plane and how to talk to the tower. No roll needed. What? You are going to fail the roll, and the tower says, "No, you can't land here, land somewhere else, jerk!" Characters without the skill won't know, and they will need help from someone with the skill (likely the person in the tower) to know what to do next.

There are a few factors playing into the confusion. One, BX and these old-school D&D-style systems never had skill systems to roll against, hence the rise of skill-based systems to give players games with task resolution based on skill use. There was a lot of houseruling in those days, too, where you could say "rolling under and ability score" was the "default skill check system of BX." I had BX groups in the 1980s who rolled under ability scores for everything as much as some 5E players do today.

This is not a new "problem" if it is even a problem. Nor is it new.

In old-school games, it is a problem. The rules are not all that consistent across the games, and almost every group had a different way of handling the exact same thing. Houseruling was so common that two groups could handle things in completely different ways.

In the modern OSR, things tend to be clearer with suggested ways of handling "skill and ability checks."

There is another source of confusion for 5E players: those who play D&D video games expect the skill roll to pop the magic d20 up on the screen, animate it, make a Price Is Right-style sound, and give them a pass-or-fail result. Real pen-and-paper games don't work that way, and there was always the role of the referee in deciding if a skill check is needed, or if one can even be attempted.

There was no "I persuade the king to make me king" with a skill roll back in the day; you were laughed out of the castle. That sort of silliness doesn't even work in GURPS either, not without mind control, and even then, everyone else is going to look at you like you just mind-controlled the king's mind.

Video games do not have a referee. All those skill rolls need to be scripted and pre-created. Live games at the table are not like that. Too many D&D players are trained to shout out a skill name when they are presented with anything by the GM, reducing it to this type of interaction:

1. The referee reads a long paragraph of description.
2. The players look at their character sheets.
3. Everyone picks a skill and says, "I roll this skill!"
4. Ugh.

This was made worse by many live-play shows, where the players shortcutted a lot of that back-and-forth for a quick, deterministic, pass-or-fail skill roll. Live play shows did a lot of damage to how D&D 5E is played, due to shortcutting the non-combat parts for time and speed of play. Those of us who rarely watch live-play shows have no clue why this is a problem.

You get this feedback loop where those who expect 5E to be a tabletop videogame will expect pass-fail "shout the skill" rolls, and those who watch live play want to shortcut interaction for time. 5E combats are long enough, where are we mucking around searching a room by describing where we look? This is 30 minutes off the 3 hours we'll need for the boss fight! I can't stay here late!

Sometimes, shortcutting those skill interactions in 5E is justified. This has nothing to do with game choice, new versus OSR, or any other pretend argument. It has everything to do with game design.

Combats in 5E run long.

Groups speed up the skill checks and roleplaying to save time.

In GURPS, combats are often quick and deadly.

We have more time to spend interacting and roleplaying with the environment.

And our skill system gives us near-infinite ways to interact with it.

If we need to roll.

Serious Combat is Fewer Combats

Deadly, quick combat makes everyone think twice before starting one. We lost that from old D&D and AD&D, and the whole "combat is fun" thing came in with Wizards and D&D 3.0. In BX and old-school games, you avoided combat. In modern games, "combat is fun," and they encourage fighting and conflict. The consequences of death and injury are purposefully diminished. You can sleep off a shotgun blast to the face in 5E and be fine the next day.

Every game Wizards have made overemphasizes combat. They treat D&D combat like a Magic: The Gathering battle. They preach balance, and that encounters are some sort of engineered, predetermined script. Adventures and combat are not events that happen in a sandbox; they are balanced, curated, pre-chewed, and carefully engineered "experience."

We never left the predetermined string of carefully balanced encounters in D&D 4E; they just hid them better. They say, "everybody wins" as a design goal. The role of the 5E DM is not the old-school neutral referee; it is that of a tour guide heading towards a prescribed outcome.

Some play 5E like a sandbox game, and it is not engineered to be played that way. It confuses the game's original intent and balance. D&D 5E is not a sim. It is a tabletop video game. If you played D&D 4E, you understand the encounter structure and adventure flow they intended in 5E.

GURPS? A sim. You don't have CR or encounter balancing here. A lucky shot can kill. Combat is dangerous. The game doesn't care about balance beyond relative skill levels and avoiding pitting 500-point enemies against beginning characters. Still, that could happen. The world is a sandbox.

GURPS is closer to roleplaying simulation science.

Old D&D was a sandbox, but with curation in the rules around "dungeon level," with deeper levels meaning more challenge. Adventure level was an extension of the concept.

D&D 3 to 5 introduces the concepts of balanced encounters, challenge ratings, and planned resource depletion. It is a completely different game, more of a curated experience and sequence of balanced encounters meant to have a range of likely outcomes.

You don't balance a GURPS world and adventure other than "saying what is there." Even in BX, you do have a certain level of balancing in that if an adventure is "for levels 1-3," you pick monsters that fit that level range. D&D has always taken balance into account, and there is even a concept of "dungeon levels" and what is found on each level, with lower levels featuring higher-level threats.

In GURPS, a dozen soldiers here, these stats, deal with them as you would in a simulator. Ten orcs in the fort, a dozen goblins, and groups of 2-3 goblins get put on patrol at random intervals. Four dire wolves in cages that get set free if an alarm is raised. Balance? I can globally adjust their average skill level to make it more or less difficult, and adjust armor and weapons. I can also adjust their reactions, making them a trained force rather than an inexperienced one.

Consequences are easier in GURPS and are cleanly supported in the system. Clear out an Orc warband fort? You are all getting a hunted disadvantage for the next few months, until they are all dead or you are. They will come after you for that. Actions have consequences. This makes my job as a referee easier. That hunted disadvantage goes on all their character sheets. I don't have to keep it in my referee's notes. If a character switches parties, they are still hunted, even though their companions may not be.

I like combat that feels like it matters, serious, deadly, and "let's think about it" decisions rather than someone players can jump into without thinking first.

GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition Revised

Hop onto the GURPS Ring of Fire Backerkit project if you want to get your hands on the new GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition Revised book. This is a nearly 600-page-long monster book that will be something to behold.

• 592-page, full-color hardcover (PDF available)
• New cover and a two-column layout 
• Contains everything from Characters and Campaigns, lightly edited for internal consistency, errata fixes, sensitivity, and to bring a few bits of information up to date.
• BONUS: Includes 25 pages of rule highlights from GURPS books and Pyramid articles published between 2004 and 2025.

The GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition Revised is not a new edition. It is fully compatible with all Fourth Edition material in print, and all text appears on the same pages, preserving page references.

I am slightly concerned about the usability of a 600-page behemoth at the table, as I love my travel bag with two copies of Characters and one of Campaigns for remote play. I can always hand out my table copy of Characters while keeping my GM copy on my side of the table.

I get it, "handing out books" is so 2015 when everyone has the PDF on their phones. Still, I love the freedom, and GURPS should never give up on by-hand generation and doing it the old way. After a nuclear war, this will be the only way to play, and we will have a lot of 5E players looking for a game when D&D Beyond goes down for good, when the Car Wars timeline catches up to us.

I remember the Pathfinder 1e core book being this huge. Can we get a new fantasy bestiary this size, too? With all the classic fantasy monsters pulled from the different monster books, plus Dungeon Fantasy? Better yet, make it a revised Fantasy Companion with spells and magic items, too. If you want to go after D&D, you deliver what the players need to play. Go big or go home, and this book does go big.

I am in on this and getting it, since I want to see the revisions. I am still playing with my classic 4th Edition books, though, my beat-up copies will still see decades more of use at my table. This book will be good for reference, errata, and for display, while my older books will still be my play copies.

What I am really waiting for is the compilation of errata and notes for the revised edition, comparing this version with the current one. That will be a handy document to print out and have.

If you play GURPS, jump on this and spread the word! The new GURPS book is almost here.

Unserious Combat

Games with unserious combat fail to hold my interest. Some may have fun story mechanics, but in general, a game's staying power with me is directly related to how seriously it takes combat and conflict.

Some, like BX, are classics I can't ignore, but they are more work for me and don't give me the narrative "sauce" I enjoy in a game. The more the game can help me tell the story, the better it is for me. With BX, it is a universal, iconic system, but it still carries a narrative coldness that demands a lot of extra work to fill in.

If a game sits there and expects you to play like an MMO and "grind down a health bar," it will not have a long life on my shelves. Similarly, games where it is a bag of hit points being depleted through abstract combat that the game "expects us to interpret" are weaker in my eyes than games that put in the work and deliver a satisfying, weighty combat experience.

Why am I, as a referee, coming up with all this meaningless color for combat descriptions? You are making my job harder as a referee without some guidelines here.

Your battleaxe does 7 damage to the goblin, who has 3 hit points; the goblin dies.

You swipe down with mighty force, hitting the goblin's shoulder and cleaving the smaller monster nearly in two with a sickening slurp and gash, goblin blood flying everywhere as the split sides fall to the ground with a wet thud.

That second one? That is me, but it gets tiring to keep making up combat color when other games just give it to me with a cherry on top. Rolemaster does this well (but has plenty of repeated results), and GURPS does a great job of providing sufficiently specific details and letting me fill in the rest.

GURPS is sort of the best middle ground here. I can roll a hit location, compare the damage type and total to the location's hits, and interpret a result with far more information than D&D gives me, with guidance from the GURPS combat system, which does a great job at laying out what happens.

From this point on, creating the color of "the sickening details" is far easier than in D&D (5E or BX), where I have to make it all up on the spot. If that arrow sails into the goblin's arm, and through it - I know exactly what to say, and throwing a maimed arm on there and a dropped weapon, shock, and a failed stun roll, is a bonus bit of information.

With 5E and BX? I need to make it all up myself.

That is part of the charm of the classic systems, but it also creates a lot of work, and not every DM is trained that well on this sort of narrative flourish. In fact, I rarely see it mentioned in the rulebooks.

With GURPS? I get enough information to get me started. My job as a referee is far easier with this much information. I am busy enough here behind the screen; anything the game can give me is appreciated. With Rolemaster, it steps a bit too far into the "too much information" level, and the repeat results need to be changed (and a list of the current ones put in short-term memory), so it ends up being too much work with too much information.

Realism and High Tech Weapons

I have been playing a lot of Star Wars recently, and dealing with targets who get hit by "blasters." They take a little damage and keep moving. Ouch, my hit points have gone down.

It is a gamist sort of view of weapon damage, health, and wounding - the classic D&D "hit points" sort of calculation, where you can have 30 hit points and get stabbed repeatedly by a knife and still live.

And I look at the blaster again and wonder what that really is. An energy bolt that hot, and with that much energy behind it, should vaporize a huge chunk of flesh from the target. Okay, welcome to GURPS, where that can and does happen. GURPS is far more satisfying with high-tech combat and what these types of weapons do to a target.

Granted, many times it is "tag, you're dead" type combat, but that is how high-tech warfare goes. Look at the battlefields of today with drones dropping grenades, and those hitting point-blank and wiping out whoever they touch. GURPS does sort of boost the lethality of lasers and blasters.

A blaster pistol does 3d(5) burn damage in GURPS and is TL 11. A TL 8 tactical vest as a DR of 12/5 versus ballistic and all other attacks. Raise that to TL 11; it's multiplied by 3, giving DR 36/15 protection. That armor divisor of 5 still cuts that down to a DR of 3, not really taking too much off that 3d attack.

So even if Han Solo had a TL 11 tactical vest (he doesn't), he takes 3d-3 damage from that blaster pistol.

Let's add trauma plates for +69 hard DR. Now we are talking. This is essentially the same item as the Monocrys Tactical Vest from GURPS Ultra Tech (UT, p173), and let's use the blaster pistol against it. Total DR is 84 vs. other attacks; divided by 5, that's 17, so near-total protection against blaster pistols (shoot for the limbs or head).

Time to break out the blaster rifle for 6d(5) damage, and now, on average, we are shooting 4 points per hit through that vest. The blaster carbine, our stormtrooper weapon (UT, p123), does 5d(5) damage, so it is just stopped by the vest, and only gets through if it rolls high.

Unprotected limbs and heads are hamburger to these weapons, as are unarmored targets. If my Star Wars character gets hit by them in GURPS, they are likely near dead or dead if they are unarmored. In most of the other Star Wars RPGs, they get a serious sunburn, lose hit points, grunt, and pretend they are hurt.

In Star Wars, I am "holding my arm," ouch.

In GURPS, "what arm?"

Sure, Star Wars is "for fun" and "it isn't meant to be realistic," but if I am spending time playing a science fiction game, I would want a higher level of realism and simulation. If I use the "not meant to be real" argument, I might as well be playing fantasy.

GURPS sci-fi combat tends to be balanced at the TL it is fought at, given equal weapons and decent armor. Why you would not be wearing decent armor in a science fiction setting is begging to be fried and microwaved by anyone with a personal arm, and it gets worse and worse as you go up tech levels.

And this is why we have cloning and cybernetics in GURPS.

GURPS forces you to look at weapons and energy beams in a realistic light. These are not "toy guns" that "knock someone over and make a puff of smoke" like they do in the movies, but serious weapons of war that, if they hit unprotected body parts, can blow them clear off. They are punching through walls like the MDC weapons of Rifts and setting structures ablaze; these are burn weapons after all. If a firefight happens in the streets of Tatooine, huge chunks are being taken out of walls, and there are likely several buildings and vehicles on fire in the general vicinity. Body parts litter the streets, along with burning corpses.

No, that is not the Star Wars that I remember.

But that is the Star Wars we get with GURPS, if you follow all the rules and don't apply a little creative license, applying that "movie reality layer" to the action. Where this all ends up is like what we got in the Asoka TV series, where a lightsaber can get pushed through someone, impaling them with a weapon that can cut through a steel bulkhead door, and they end up with a small burn on their tummy.

"But, it's hit points damage!"

GURPS, take me away from this insanity! Bring me back to a universe that makes sense, and where pulling out a blaster pistol (or any weapon, for that matter) was a lethal escalation of conflict. Even in GURPS fantasy, sliding out the 3-foot blade of a longsword meant a whole lot more than a non-lethal 1d8 metal stick of D&D 5E.

"But the guards had 20 hit points, it wasn't gonna kill them!"

It seems that, at times, the more superheroic and cinematic our games get, the less connected to reality they are, and the more the entire player base slips into madness. There are times I just want to wash my hands of it all and return to sanity, to games that treat conflict as a serious and weighty choice, and not whack-a-mole with foam-rubber swords.

There are times when I feel GURPS plays faster than D&D 5E, since combat is more lethal and ends sooner, and players are far less likely to engage in conflict because it is so deadly.

With GURPS, I like a harder science fiction campaign, like my GURPS Cepheus game. I sort of want to abandon the science-fantasy elements of Star Wars, especially the modern writing that makes me want to box up my Star Wars games and encase them in carbonite. I have to keep equating classic Star Wars with the OSR, compartmentalizing the modern movies and TV shows, and putting them in their own universe.

While Classic Star Wars is fun, my GURPS Cepheus game feels real to me. There is this "put on" factor with Star Wars that removes it from reality, and the fantasy elements take that grit and realism away, making it feel more like the Flash Gordon movie, campy, pulpy, and unrealistic. If I am in the mood for it, great, but there are times where I want the cold, hard vacuum of space to surround my character like a blanket of fear and dread, where landing on a new world is full of uncertainty and wonder, and walking around a remote settlement armed with a blaster on my character's hip feels like they are there for serious reasons, and if violence breaks out, that could be the end.

That feels real to me.

The rules, characters, skills, and dangers of the technology and universe make this a harsh, unforgiving, and deadly place.

When we are talking about what compels me to play, what makes it all feel real, and why I keep coming back, GURPS will deliver more of that feeling, easier and faster, and without sacrificing the cold, hard math of the future. Those high-tech weapons are all insanely deadly. You need to think seriously about protection and having the strength to haul it around on foot.

There will be times when you go without, and you won't have those high-tech toys to protect you because of local laws and restrictions. You will need to be able to fight with your fists or improvised weapons. You won't be in body armor. And you may encounter those with high-tech weapons while you are at a disadvantage. You will need to use the environment to your advantage and figure out a way to fight back.

I am immersed.

The danger is real.

I am right there, in that world, experiencing like I am in VR.

My character matters; all their hang-ups, weaknesses, strengths, and skills critically matter. This is all highly compelling and excites my brain, making me not want to play, but I need to play.

This is GURPS to me.